Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary and other new movies everyone will be talking about this week

MA (110 minutes)

The trailer for Mother Mary proclaims that this is neither a love story nor a ghost story. But whatever other labels might be apt, it’s undeniably a film by writer-director David Lowery (Peter Pan & Wendy), whose name rhymes with “flowery,” and whose work retains its mix of shrewdness and preciousness whether he’s working for Disney or for the independent US studio A24.

Mother Mary is one of Lowery’s A24 films, carefully balanced between art and pop, not too explicitly queer but centred on the same kind of charged relationship between two women that fuelled Celine Sciamma’s game-changing Portrait of a Lady On Fire.

Anne Hathaway stars as Mother Mary herself, a legendary US pop star who comes knocking one night on the door of British fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Back when they were both getting started, Sam was largely responsible for Mary’s now-iconic look – but while the two were once inseparable, following a professional break-up they haven’t spoken in years.

MA (93 minutes)

Be careful what you wish for. It’s a lesson Homer Simpson learnt the hard way during a 1991 episode loosely drawn from The Monkey’s Paw, an early 20th-century classic in horror fiction.

Homer acquires his own enchanted paw while on holiday in Marrakesh, ignoring the vendor’s warning that this dodgy souvenir will bring him grave misfortune. Naturally, mayhem ensues.

Twenty-six year-old writer-director Curry Barker, a comedian with a passion for the macabre, credits Homer’s unthinking act as an inspiration for his debut feature, Obsession. Having become a YouTube sensation with his creepy collection of short films, Barker and his team cobbled together enough money to embark on this movie. Its Toronto Festival premiere then sparked a bidding war and Barker is now the latest star of the current boom in psychological horror.

(M) 104 minutes

“I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax,” runs a line in the 1977 Talking Heads hit Psycho Killer. It’s a song we hear more than once in Rebecca Zlotowski’s mystery-thriller, A Private Life, starring Jodie Foster in her first French-speaking lead role, as Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst long resident in Paris.

The song is aptly chosen, for a couple of reasons. To start with, the lyrics are a mixture of English and French, like the dialogue here. Lilian has lived long enough in her adopted country to have acquired an ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil), an adult son (Vincent Lacoste) and a newborn grandchild. But when she curses under her breath she does so in her native tongue.

More importantly, “tense and nervous” could describe the default state of many of the characters played by Foster over the years – including Lilian, whose controlled anxiety is evident from the first scene of her moving restlessly around her expensive, dimly lit apartment, which doubles as the office where she receives patients.

MA (116 minutes)

There is, as the members of Spinal Tap taught us, a fine line between stupid and clever. Mortal Kombat II stars Karl Urban as Johnny Cage, a former B-grade action star plucked from obscurity to fight in a life-or-death tournament pitting the champions of Earth against a line-up of extradimensional warriors led by the masked Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford).

That’s potentially a funny idea, however often we’ve seen versions of it before, and it licenses director Simon McQuoid and writer Jeremy Slater to incorporate shout-outs to numerous action movies, from Big Trouble in Little China to the John Wick series. But beyond signalling their self-awareness, the parody doesn’t have much of a point.

A recurring character in the Mortal Kombat video game series, Cage was created back in 1992 as a parody of Jean-Claude Van Damme. But beyond his sunglasses and leather jacket, Urban’s version of the character bears little resemblance to Van Damme or to any other actual ’90s action star who springs to mind.

PG (114 minutes)

There’s a paradox to the concert documentary Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard And Soft, filmed last year in Manchester midway through the tour that accompanied Eilish’s album of the same name. The film is conceived as a massive, overpowering spectacle, shot in 3D by blockbuster supremo James Cameron (co-directing with Eilish herself).

But it’s also meant to be raw, intimate, even minimal. There are no thrusting back-up dancers or elaborate costume changes: mostly it’s just Eilish on her own, marching around in her basketball jersey and baggy shorts, a tiny figure in command of a stadium.

Interspersed with the concert footage is a fair amount of behind-the-scenes material: we get to see Eilish crawling around beneath the stage and doing her own makeup, as further reassurance that she’s just a regular person.

M (95 minutes)

Don’t Be Prey is a documentary about a group of marathon swimmers who have devoted decades to an extreme and protracted sporting event called Oceans Seven that requires them to complete a total of seven channel swims in separate parts of the world without using a wetsuit or a shark cage.

Designed as a marine equivalent of the mountaineering challenge Seven Summits, it takes them to the Irish Sea, the English Channel, the Mediterranean and the Pacific to tackle a series of waterways chosen with an exquisite regard for their most punishing features.

In the Irish Sea, they are threatened by hypothermia in water that can fall five degrees in 30 minutes. The Cook Strait offers a night swim through kelp forests harbouring various unfriendly sea creatures and in the Hawaiian Islands, if the box jellyfish don’t find you first, you may come across the Cookiecutter Shark. It’s named for a round mouth that is ringed by a row of pointed teeth, and if you attract its interest, it’s likely to take a deep, circular bite out of you.